So, we decided to tackle this problem head-on by putting together our own curated list of the best marketing articles ever.

The challenge + our methodology

Most existing curated lists of the “best marketing articles” fail for one simple reason:

They’re too subjective.

We realised early-on in this process that should we go down the route of simply picking our own personal favourites, we’d fall into the same trap; here’s how we compiled our initial list of blog posts:

We created a list of 12 subtopics falling under the general “marketing” umbrella (e.g. SEO, copywriting, etc);

We manually sifted through the list of posts and plucked out the best of the best.

This resulted in a nice list of initial posts.

We then reached out to a couple hundred “experts” and asked them to share their favorite marketing-related posts of all time. The idea here was to crowdsource a list of the best marketing posts directly from industry influencers.

This didn’t work too well.

Why? Because many people seemed to be suggesting their own content (it seemed like a lot of them viewed this as yet another “expert roundup” post).

Still, we added any genuine suggestions to our initial list of blog posts under the appropriate category.

We now had a huge list of 200+ blog posts, but we wanted to refine this further into a much smaller list.

We didn’t want to do by hand as we felt this would add bias to the final list.

So, we decided to create a survey and leave it up to the marketing community to vote for their favourites.

We sent the survey out to our subscriber base of 47K+ people, posted it on Reddit (in /r/bigSEO), Inbound.org, and also promoted it via Facebook ads.

248 of you completed the survey.

Sidenote.

10x more people started filling in the survey but didn’t finish because it was rather long.

Lastly, we sifted through all the data and compiled the list you see below.

65 best marketing articles of all time (as of 2017)

Below, we have a total of 65 marketing articles under the following 12 categories:

These aren’t ranked by any particular level of awesomeness; they’re all equally awesome.

It’s worth noting that, rather flatteringly, many people were raving about content from Ahrefs Blog. We’re very proud of this, but we tried to put the spotlight on articles from other sources when compiling this list.

If you want to read the best from Ahrefs blog, you can always find an updated list on the blog homepage.

It’s also worth noting that this list is aimed primarily at marketing newbies, as it will help you to quickly learn the best from the best. However, a lot of marketers today are “generalists”, so if you feel your knowledge is lacking in a specific area (e.g. PPC), it’ll be well worth checking our article suggestions under that category.

Let’s go!

General Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a confusing topic.

I remember when I first started learning about SEO, I felt like one blog post would say one thing, only to be contradicted five minutes later by the next post I read.

This makes for a very steep learning curve, especially for SEO “newbies”.

Here are the five best SEO articles voted for by you. There’s something for everyone here, regardless of your current level of knowledge.

We didn’t include these in the top five list above (as we wanted our list to be as unbiased as possible and there were quite a few Ahrefs fans among the voters), but David McSweeney’s list of 200+ Actionable SEO Tips and Tim Soulo’s on-page SEO analysis (of 2M keywords) were actually ranked no.1 and no.5 respectively.

It would also be fair to point out that “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors” article might not be entirely accurate, so we thought we should also include a different view at Google’s ranking factors: The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors.

Link Building

Many people struggle with link building, especially when it comes to using outreach-based strategies (note: almost all worthwhile links will be built via outreach).

Again, it’s not so much that link-building is particularly difficult; there’s just a lot of shady, lazy advice scattered across the web.

This can quickly lead to confusion.

Here are five of the best link-building articles on the web (note: these five posts alone contain hundreds of amazing strategies):

David McSweeney’s “Noob Guide to Link Building” was actually ranked no.2. But adding it on a list above would not be very objective, as I wrote before.

Keyword Research + “Technical” SEO

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of proper keyword research, yet very few people give it the time and attention it deserves.

This is true for both “newbies” and seasoned SEOs alike.

It’s the same story for anything that falls under the “technical SEO” umbrella; people generally underestimate its importance and instead invest all their time, energy and resources almost entirely into link building.

This is a BIG mistake.

Here are the five articles (with the highest number of votes) relating to both KW research and technical SEO: